'Bark': Eye for detail unites narratives in collection

Friday

Feb 28, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 2, 2014 at 10:23 AM

The characters who populate the eight short stories in Lorrie Moore's Bark include a government agent, a biographer of George Washington and a one-armed modern dancer. It is an eclectic mix, but no matter who is doing the talking, we never forget that it is the acclaimed author of Birds of America who is doing the telling.

The characters who populate the eight short stories in Lorrie Moore’s Bark include a government agent, a biographer of George Washington and a one-armed modern dancer. It is an eclectic mix, but no matter who is doing the talking, we never forget that it is the acclaimed author of Birds of America who is doing the telling.

Bark is Moore’s first gathering of stories since that prize-winning collection, and her gift for scrutinizing everyday details remains.

In Subject to Search, the protagonist is on a romantic dinner date in France with an old friend, but that doesn’t stop her mind from wandering. Tone deaf to foreign languages, she worries that she has placed her order for lamb couscous incorrectly.

“When lamb was a food, was it a different word, the way pork and pig were?” she asks. “Perhaps she had ordered a living, breathing creature mewling in broth and fleece.”

As she attempts a dignified goodbye to her companion, she bungles a gesture with her fingers and blows him a kiss as his car drives off, “but the car took a quick right down the Rue du Bac. A kiss blown — in all ways.”

Few writers are better than Moore at standing in and speaking for their fictional creations.

Paper Losses charts a wife’s piecemeal awareness of her husband’s aloofness in their marriage, conjured up indirectly, and hauntingly, by Moore.

“A blackness had entered his blue-green eyes,” she writes. “They stayed wide and bright, but nonfunctional — like dime-store jewelry.”

Occasionally, Moore’s presence becomes too obvious.

A man’s gait is referred to as “lopey” in one story, while a 15-year-old girl is said to have “ loped across the yard” in another.

Also irksome is that, despite her characters’ differences, many seem to share similar sentiments. They watch PBS, bemoan the re-election of George W. Bush or plant anti-war signs in their yards.

Yet one of the best stories commends the value of keeping an open mind. In Foes, biographer Bake McKurty makes the acquaintance of a right-wing woman at a literary journal’s fundraiser. Listening to her opinions on politics, he barely conceals his scorn. Then it comes out that she lived through the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, prompting him to reconsider his judgments about her, if not her views.

Also keeping Bark from becoming too homogeneous is an unexpected twist in the anomalous but lovely The Juniper Tree. Not long after learning that a character has died of cancer, we encounter the dead woman’s ghost, setting off a funny night of singing, dancing and gift-giving in her honor.

Moore treats the appearance of the apparition with understatement.

“She simply, newly, had the imperial standoffishness I realized only then that I had always associated with the dead,” Moore writes, in the voice of the protagonist. “We pulled up chairs and then each of us sat.”